Dear Anne, 2025, 4-channel HD video installation, 25 min 16 sec..
Dear Anne is an artistic inquiry into Walton Hall, the world’s first nature reserve, established by Charles Waterton at the beginning of the 19th century in the United Kingdom. Originally intended as a walled and protected sanctuary for birds, it is now the site of an exclusive golf club. In a series of videos, presented as letters to Waterton’s wife Anne, Sarah Van Marcke investigates how this landscape reveals our ideas about nature, ownership, and history. Dear Anne questions the nature reserve as a constructed space in which care, control, and exclusion are deeply intertwined.
The video installation was developed during a residency near Walton Hall, where Van Marcke delved into the lesser-known history of Anne Edmonstone: a young woman of Guyanese descent who came to the estate through an arranged marriage and lived in the heart of the reserve. Through her story, Van Marcke traces the site's transformation — from conservation to exclusivity — and its enduring links to colonial plantation economies that helped finance the creation of the estate. Past and present merge in a landscape where the scars of history remain tangible today.